Wild Country: the Ovens River

By Clare McCracken and Heather Hesterman 

It is believed that the water flowing through the Ovens River is the same water that has always been on Earth, arriving four and a half billion years ago as the solar system formed. Therefore, the water of the Ovens has moved through the capillaries of plants, nurtured new life in wombs, leisurely advanced through underground aquifers and lapped against tall ships, canoes and bulk carriers. Water records in its molecular architecture the pasts we may not be able to see or that have been actively erased. Therefore, to think with water - to think with the Ovens River - is to remember.  

With impressive granite rocks and majestic river red gums, the Ovens River and its watershed are picturesque, making it a much-loved recreational site for camping, swimming, paddling, and fishing. Yet historical and current-day ecological impacts through mining, agriculture, and climate change have indelibly altered its landscape. This project explores the environmental history and social importance of the Ovens River and its watershed through archival images from the State Library, writing, participatory arts practice and documentation of performative fieldwork.  

Wild Country grew out of the COVID-19 pandemic and its extensive lockdowns. Yearning for the river of her childhood, Clare embarked on a comprehensive research project. With backgrounds in art, performance and connections to the Ovens River, Clare and Heather collaborated to generate creative responses exploring the river and its tributaries by performing acts of care documented throughout this project.

We would like to acknowledge the Dhudhuroa, Taungurung, Waywurru, Gunaikurnai and Jaithmathang as the First Peoples and Traditional Custodians of the upper Ovens River and we pay our deepest respects to Elders past and present. We would also like to acknowledge the other Aboriginal groups that have an ongoing connection to the region.

Exhibited at Wangaratta Gallery 2024, by Clare McCracken and Heather Hesterman with Andrew Ferris, Scarlet Sykes Hesterman and Xander Reichard.

River Valley Costumes

Inspired by the clothes of the first settlers and the contemporary farm manager, these costumes reference the DDT that flowed through the land and water of the Ovens River through the colour yellow. Patchworked fabric with printed native grasses and detailed with golden quilting represents the loss of native grasses due to settler land use and land management, such as hooved animals, mining, dividing the land into farms and the deliberate disruption of vital cultural practices. Inside the pockets of the costume, native plants endemic to the Ovens Valley grow in recycled containers. The plants sit alongside photographs of the upper Ovens taken by Harry Langham between 1891-93 from the State Library of Victoria collection.   

All that is lost and sometimes found

These photographs were taken within a pine plantation beside the Ovens River.  Plantation pine is of great economic value to the upper Ovens, and this section of land, with its undulating terrain, is marked by the telltale signs of mining. The artists wear a costume that articulates how the river has been environmentally impacted post colonisation.  The costumes pockets hold native plants that would have once been endemic to the locale.  Therefore, in this action, the artists reintroduce the native plant species that can no longer grow, or barely grow, beside the Ovens.  The larger image is printed on pine sourced from the Myrtleford Mill, the processing plant for the pine plantation.

Feral Actions

In this action, the artists converted the River Valley costumes to become agents of care, filling their pockets with rubbish and the introduced plant species that line the river’s banks. The Ovens River has an impressive history of volunteer-led environmental campaigning, from the anti-sludge campaigners, which grew out of the first gold rush, to the anti-dredge and DDT volunteers (1). Today volunteers regularly clean, replant and care for the river.   

(1) See Lawrence, S and Davies, P 2019, Sludge, La Trobe University Press, Melbourne and Robertson, K 1973 Myrtleford: Gateway to the Alps, Rigby Limited, Hong Kong.  

Alpine Costumes

Inspired by Alice Manfield’s photography taken on Mount Buffalo (1890 - 1930) and the sails of the first European ships to bring convicts, soldiers, migrants and other invasive species to the continent, these costumes conceptually degrade the settler's costume through the dyeing and screen-printing of alpine lichen species. Lichen inexorably changes the chemical weathering of rocks as it excretes various organic acids, particularly oxalic acid, which dissolves minerals. As it does so, it creates soil that fosters life in the form of plants.  A scarf, made from a rubbing of the mountains distinct granite rocks, references the contemporary recreational use of the mountain, mirroring the puffer jacket warn by hikers, cross-country skiers and rock climbers.

Bogong, Pigmy, Sallee and Sallow: critical relations

Eurobin Falls is one of the most photographed sites on Mount Buffalo. It features prominently in historical imagery and on Instagram today.  In this action, the artists use movement and the camera shutter to erase themselves – settlers – from the heart of the photo to make room for other histories, futures and the mountain’s non-human companions. Mount Buffalo is a site of critical relations impacted by colonisation and climate change. Formed an estimated 420 million years ago, the mountain's rocks have witnessed those relations form and start to crumble.  Long after the departure of the settler, the rocks will remember the First Custodians of the Mountain and its name before Hume and Hovel likened it to a yoked buffalo. They will also remember the endangered Bogong moth and the Pigmy Possum that eats the moth, and the Buffalo sallee and sallow, a gum tree and wattle endemic to the mountain that are not found anywhere else in the world and rely on cool temperatures and pollinators like the pigmy possum for survival. The rocks of Mount Buffalo, moving skyward by a tenth of a millimetre each year, will remember the fast violence of colonisation and the slow violence, as Rob Nixon has described it, of climate change until they crack, fragment and roll down the mountain.   

flattening the sublime

Once settlers arrived in northeastern Victoria, Mount Buffalo was documented by painters such as Nicholas Chevalier and Eugene von Guerard and photographers from the 1860s as a site of sublime beauty: an untouched wilderness that should be protected.  While this visual culture contributed to the protection of the Mountain through the establishment of the Mount Buffalo National Park in 1898, as Jarrod Hore has forcibly articulated (1), it also erased the significant occupation of the mountain by the Mogullumbidj people (2), their care for Country, and the mountain’s exceptional cultural importance. Struggling into the fog, the artists attempt to flatten the sublime, making way for other understandings of the mountain and its history. 

1. Hore, J 2022, Visions of Nature: How visions of nature shaped settler colonialism, University of California Press.  

1. See Durrant, J 2020, ‘Mogullumbidj: First People of Mount Buffalo’, Victorian Historical Journal, 91:1. 

exhibition View Wangaratta Gallery, 2024